Review
MELINDA AND MELINDA
Starring Radha Mitchell, Will Farrell and Chloë Sevigny
Written and directed by Woody Allen
Opens Friday, April 8
Check listings
The act of reacting to a new Woody Allen film has become as much of an annual production as the films themselves. Each spring a new project is released and meets a now-standard shrug of indifference.
Alongside a growing swell of critical shredding of each and every film since Annie Hall as a pale second-tier shadow of his 1970s successes, it has become easy to treat these films unfairly. I won’t offer much defence for last year’s Anything Else (although the sight of Woody smashing some random thug’s car with a crowbar was hilarious), but Melinda and Melinda is a far higher form of cinematic comedy than what passes for laughs on the big screen these days.
Borrowing pages from a number of his past masterpieces – as they themselves borrowed liberally from Allen’s heroes before him – Melinda and Melinda focuses on the idea of story and the act of writing more than it does on the actual story being told. In a setup similar to Broadway Danny Rose (in which a group of comedians reminisce about the titular talent agent), a group of New York intellectuals sit around a deli table debating the nature of life as comedy or tragedy. Like Interiors and Hannah and Her Sisters, a trio of women form the cracked foundation of the story and like Crimes and Misdemeanors, Melinda and Melinda is split between a serious side and a comedic side, in this case a paradoxical presentation of the story of Melinda (a fantastic Radha Mitchell). As the two playwrights in the deli (Wallace Shaun and Larry Pine) make up their differing versions of her story, we watch them unfold in comparison. A few of the film’s funniest lines show up in the tragic telling of the tale which shows where Allen is leading with all of this, but for the most part Melinda and Melinda retains his hilarious yet hopeless worldview.
Unfortunately, yes, a few of the most glaring lapses in Anything Else are still present here – namely the younger characters’ rather unbelievable lives as Upper West Side snobs (it’s difficult to buy Chloe Sevigny as a Park Avenue princess) and Allen’s seeming disconnection with anyone under 30, despite his wife’s age. Shot beautifully by Vilmos Zsigmond (The Deer Hunter, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), all of Allen’s characters dress like country-club seniors three steps from a high-priced cryogenic preservation tube – presidential wife pantsuits and pleated khakis. But Melinda and Melinda isn’t as much about its characters as it is about our interpretation of these characters – whether we in the audience view life as a comedy or a tragedy – and in that it’s often fascinating.
Indeed, major props are due for getting the name Will Ferrell on the lips of the world’s intellectual set – as a surrogate Allen, Ferrell doesn’t lose his ample personality as Kenneth Branagh did in Celebrity and pulls off a hilarious performance as an oft-suffering out-of-work actor. He also earns bonus points for finally admitting that, yes, African-Americans do indeed live in Allen’s upwardly mobile neighbourhoods, with a particularly fine showing by Chiwetel Ejiofor as the tragic Melinda’s paramour, Ellis. Given that Allen’s last major black character was Hazelle Goodman’s prostitute, Cookie, in 1997’s Deconstructing Harry, it’s long-overdue).
Even a lousy Woody Allen film could only be made by Woody Allen (I’m looking at you, Edward Burns), a sign of a true auteur if ever there was one. Melinda and Melinda is by no means one of Allen’s greatest accomplishments, yet it stands on its own two feet as a worthwhile diversion in one of cinema’s most impressive filmographies. |
Copyright ©2005 FFWD. All rights reserved.